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Did you know that 88 percent of businesses consider video a vital part of the online marketing strategy? And, with high quality 4K video being simple and cheap to produce with either a smartphone or DSLR camera, there’s no reason for you to be a part of the 12 percent! Here are three tips for DIYing engaging videos that’ll win you customers without wiping out your funds.

Take viewers behind the scenes. Success online is as much about authenticity as anything else. People want to see the real you. What better way to give them a glimpse of that than by sharing behind-the-scenes video? And it doesn’t have to be fancy. Use your smartphone to record preparations for an event or your employees volunteering for a charity. This kind of video bridges the distance between your brand and your customer by helping you connect with your audience on a personal level.

Make sure your audio is good. All that authenticity will be wasted if your audio is bad. People may be tired of slick marketing materials, but they want to be able to hear what’s being said. Unpolished shouldn’t equate to unintelligible. Listen for pops, hisses or echoes in your video. Project your voice and think about investing in a USB microphone. Blue Microphone’s Yeti and Snowball models are two good options that aren’t overly expensive. Audacity is a free editing software that has an easy-to-use tutorial. Making so-so audio superb doesn’t take much, but the payoff is huge.

Master your message. Always keep in mind that your video isn’t about you. It’s about your client. Put yourself in your customers’ shoes and think about what they’d like to see, hear and learn about your company. Deliver value and make it personal.

Creating great video content isn’t as simple as just hitting ‘record’. But it doesn’t have to be overly time consuming or expensive. Even on a budget, you can produce an engaging video that builds your brand and converts viewers to clients.

Here’s a bold prediction. Even if you stumble across this post in the year 2040, it’s likely SEO will still be a deciding factor in your company’s success. Sure, the world will look like a different place, but the ability to put content related to your brand in front of people will always be one of the most important steps you can take if you want to remain competitive.

SEO, or Search Engine Optmization, is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine’s “natural” or un-paid (“organic”) search results. In short, the more effective your SEO strategies, the easier it will be to find your website when it’s searched online.

SEO is a buzzword that never goes out of style. Your understanding of it, how it works, and why it works may be hazy, but inevitably, as a business owner, you know you need it — and that you need it to be good. And even though you know you need it, you may not know why.

That’s where we come in. Here’s an overview of five solid reasons you need a SEO strategy for your website.

1. It’s always worked, still works, and will continue working.
The efficiency of SEO has been questioned over time, but its validity still stands. While Google algorithms continue to evolve, your rankings will still improve when the proper SEO strategies are utilized.

2. SEO never sleeps.
Even your most dedicated team member has to recharge at some point, right? Not even your social media can be in absolute real-time 24 hours a day. Good SEO is a tool that functions for you around the clock ensuring you have ideal traffic to your site and qualified leads pouring in.

3. It’s a solid investment.
There’s a joke that goes, “Where is the best place to bury a body? On the second page of Google.” In other words, if you’re not found in the first page of results from a search engine, you might as well not even exist, right? Investing in a solid SEO strategy can ensure your visibility is good and stays good. In comparison to many other internet marketing activities, the budget expense for this is very cost-effective.

4. Everyone is looking online.
A huge majority of consumers are checking product reviews online prior to purchasing. If they’re looking for services, they’re doing their research as well. Ensure your organization is visible both via desktop and mobile devices. More than 75 percent of consumers don’t leave the first page of search results. Are you capturing your audience where they’re looking?

5. Everyone’s doing it.
Chances are, your competitor has SEO tactics in place. Chances are, ALL of your competitors are working at it. Don’t sweep it under the rug. Make a concerted effort to increase your brand awareness, connectivity, and searchability to ensure your competitors can’t box you out.

If your brand has been treating short stories on Facebook, Instagram and SnapChat just like regular posts — or you’re not using the short stories feature much at all — then you could be missing out on valuable opportunities to engage your audience and gain actionable insights on their consumer behaviors and preferences.

Since more and more users are flocking to short stories on social media every year, it’s absolutely critical for every brand to keep up with their followers by incorporating their favorite stories features into an ongoing engagement/marketing campaign. Although social media sites are always coming up with inventive new ways to get businesses and consumers excited about short stories, you can’t go wrong with these 3 tried-and-true ways to get the most value out of your approach to short stories:

Behind the Scenes Sneak Peeks

A classic short stories strategy that every brand should be using at least sometimes is the “behind-the-scenes” preview. Even if you’re not a brick-and-mortar business, you can still give loyal followers an exclusive glimpse at your operations, new products or services, virtual meet-and-greets with your staff and/or influencers, and so much more.

Similar to movie trailers or blooper reels, the “behind-the-scenes” approach is great for personalizing brands and connecting with audience members on a deeper level by giving them unique, limited-time experiences that only the dedicated early birds will see before your story expires 24 hours later.

Engaging Polls

Want to get more information from your audience members without paying for expensive consumer data research or collecting information on your website (which few people voluntarily offer)? Running polls on your short stories can be an excellent alternative for a few key reasons:

• Short stories have limited response possibilities (typically 2), which can increase your chances of getting more respondents
• You can ask multiple questions across several short story posts (making it a fun mini-survey for your fans)
• You can figure out what your followers like/need/want by presenting them with two options and asking them which one they like more
• You can run weekly trivia contests through your short stories feature to keep followers engaged with interesting, fresh material

Fan Shout-Outs

A final thing you could do with short stories on social media is giving shout-outs to your most dedicated followers without creating an entire post dedicated to them (which could be a turn-off for some other followers). You can do this by posting screenshots of someone who liked several of your posts, host “Follower Fridays” by tagging some of your fans in a short story post and offering prizes if they respond within 24 hours, or any other type of shout-out that you’d like to try with your fanbase.

Blogs have been around a long time, and for good reason. They’re effective channels to engage audiences through fresh, relevant content. The best way to engage audiences is by presenting the most captivating content in the most ideal way. It’s actually not as hard at it sounds as long as you follow this five-step checklist for blog perfection:

Start off with an opening hook
Why should people read your blog post? You’ll want to address that in the first paragraph in the most engaging way possible. A good way to approach this is by thinking of your audience and what problem it will solve or how the information will help the reader. Put yourself in your reader’s shoes and think about what would engage you in the first paragraph. Also, look at examples of blog posts on the Internet to get a feel for how others do it, especially your competition.

Write a short, creative headline
The headline is perhaps the most important part of your blog post. It is the first thing people see on search engine results, on social media and elsewhere. If you don’t have an eye-catching headline, the reader will just scroll past it or click away. A good rule of thumb is to get the point of your article across in a clear, direct and creative way. Shorter is also better: Research shows that shorter headlines receive far more clicks and engagement than those that are longer.

Incorporate high-quality visuals
A blog post can reach a lot more people and has the potential to become more viral if it has high-quality visuals. Studies show that readers will be more immersed in your content as well as more likely to share it if you include visuals. In fact, the most engaging posts on social media include an image and many of them come from blog posts. Along with increasing engagement, visuals allow your audience to see what your blog post is about rather than just read about it.

Break up your paragraphs with engaging information
The best blog posts consist of information that is easy to scan and digest. Keep each of your paragraphs short and add bulleted lists, statistics, graphs, pull quotes, block quotes, interesting facts, infographics, videos and anything else that is going to make your article pop. Information in these formats will provide more credibility and detail to your post, which can hook people in until the end.

Close with a clear call-to-action
What do you want your audience to do after reading your blog post? Make sure that your call-to-action is clear in your concluding paragraph, but also does not provide an annoying sales pitch. Rather than telling them to buy a product or service or visit a web page, encourage your readers to engage with you. Provide a question and ask your readers to leave comments. You could also present a link to a poll, quiz, or even direct people to a whitepaper or ebook for more information.

Now, we will close this blog post using the final tip as inspiration. Which of the five steps above have you incorporated in your blog posts? Is there anything else you do to engage readers?

Writing creative, engaging captions is one of the most difficult aspects of social media marketing. Considering our unprecedented access to millions of high-quality stock images, finding the perfect visual elements for a social post is practically effortless in comparison to writing clever captions, which still requires a bit of critical thinking, skillful writing and audience awareness.

Even if writing isn’t necessarily your strength as a marketer, you can still write acceptable captions for your social media posts, as long as you avoid these engagement-ending, conversion-killing mistakes:

Spelling and Grammatical Errors

This may sound like common sense advice, but you might be surprised by how many brands slip up on the proofreading process before publishing on social media. Mistakes happen every now and again, but if you’re consistently misspelling the same words, using incorrect grammar (e.g., there vs. their vs. they’re), or using improper capitalization for certain titles, then you might be inadvertently driving followers and potential customers away with your imprecise spelling and grammar.

All Sales, No Substance

One of the most common problems with social media captions is that the brand is too focused on their message of Buy! Buy! Buy! and forgetting to consistently engage their followers. If a vast majority of your posts involve some message about buying your products/services, then it’s time for a caption makeover.

You can engage followers by asking them questions (which, in turn, gives you valuable demographic/psychographic information), running polls (a fan favorite for Instagram stories in particular), and asking them to post photos of themselves (user-generated content opportunity!). This isn’t to say you should avoid explicit sales-driven captions at all costs; instead, make sure your salesy messages are posted alongside other, more substantive captions that treat audiences like human beings instead of potential customers.

Minimal Variety in Messages

Perhaps you don’t have an issue with too many sales messages on your social profiles, yet your brand still isn’t getting the engagement you’d like to have with your target audience. What’s going on?

Read through your last 10-20 social posts and take notes on your captions. Are you mostly just asking people to like and share if they agree with the caption? Are you mostly posting statements, without ever posing questions for audience members to answer in the comment section? Are you mostly relying on evergreen captions (which are always loosely relevant) or are you incorporating recent trends and seasonal messages into your captions?

Make sure your brand is always offering insightful advice, intriguing questions, and compelling calls-to-action in your captions to prevent audience members from growing bored with your content.

Too Many Hashtags or Emojis

On the one hand, you don’t want to have a boring caption with only a general, forgettable hashtag and no emojis. On the other hand, you don’t want to drown your captions in hashtags and emojis in an attempt to appeal to audience members’ interest in diversified, clever captions.

To achieve balance and maximize engagement, strive to include one or two hashtags per Twitter post and two to five hashtags per Instagram post, along with an emoji or two. It’s important to consistently experiment with new styles (e.g., one hashtag and four emojis for a post then three hashtags and no emojis for another post) to see what types of caption content work best for your target audience.